Robby on Rails

This question, “where can I find documentation for Edge Rails?” still comes up quite often on mailing lists, IRC, and other places. I just wanted to point out a few resources for you.

In March 2006, our team announced that we’d be updating a RDOC site a few times a day as the Rails project gets commits.

You can still access the PLANET ARGON Edge Rails documentation here:

• http://edgedocs.planetargon.org

Caboose also has some Edge Rails documentation here:

• http://caboo.se/doc.html

If you’re aware of any other online resources for Edge Rails documentation, please let me know.

If you’ve spent much time on the Ruby on Rails wiki, you know that the spam situation smells like rotten fruit.

We’ve been using Instiki, the same software as the Rails wiki for the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project and the spam situation was becoming an annoyance. So, we’ve switched to JunebugWiki as step one, to see how it holds up. The default styling was a nice improvement because we haven’t had much chance to update the instiki one. It might not solve all of our spam problems, but in the short term, it appears to be a more elegant solution. It’s also the first application built with camping that I have personally deployed.

So… I present to you… the new PLANET ARGON Documentation Project.

In other news, it appears that RubyURL has caught the eye of spammers, which sucks. I’m still thinking over a few possible ways to try and prevent that. :-/

Hey! You’re a cheater!

Well, if you’re not… I’m hoping to make one out of you.

“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”—W. C. Fields

I’m a fan of the PDF cheat sheets as I like the consolidated content contained in them. However, I don’t like having to read PDFs any more than I have to. Printing them isn’t always ideal either as I really don’t like to carry around extra paper in my laptop bag. So, what are we to do?

Well, you can cheat the system! ...and I’m going to show you how!

Cheat is this really nice command-line tool that outputs a plain text cheat sheet whenever and wherever you want.

Install the Cheat

Like all the happy and good Rubygems, this is quite simple…

$ sudo gem install cheat

Done! Okay… let’s try to do some cheating. Don’t worry, your friends and family will forgive you.

Becoming a Cheat(er)

To view a cheat sheet, just run the cheat command from your favorite terminal window.

$ cheat _cheat name_

So, for example… to see the cheat sheet for RSpec, run cheat rspec.

    $ cheat rspec
    rspec:
      INSTALL
      =======
      $ sudo gem install rspec

      $ ./script/plugin install
      svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/REL_X_Y_Z/vendor/rspec_on_rails/vendor/p
      ugins/rspec
      Where X_Y_Z is the version number.

      $ ./script/generate rspec
            create  spec
            create  spec/spec_helper.rb
            create  spec/test2spec.erb
            create  test/test2spec_help.rb
            create  script/rails_spec
            create  script/rails_spec_runner

      HOW TO USE
      ==========
      ./script/generate rspec_model User

####################################################
# truncated to save precious bandwidth
####################################################

Because this is all printing out in your shell, you can take advantage of your favorite command line tools.

Piping to grep

$ cheat rspec | grep 'equal' 
      @user.errors.on(:username).should_equal "is required" 
  target.should_equal <value>
  target.should_not_equal <value>

Piping to TextMate

$ cheat rspec | mate

Find more Cheats

Head over to this list of cheats to see what is currently available.

Thanks to the Err team for putting this together!

Let me start off by saying that our customers are awesome. That’s right. They are awesome.

A while back, I announced the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project and since then our documentation has gone through several changes and it’s being driven by several of our hosting customers.

As of today, all PLANET ARGON hosting customers will notice this when they login to their control panel.

For more information about hour rails hosting, visit www.planetargon.com.

For more information about our documentation project, visit docs.planetagon.com.